Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe: Ecopoetics of Navajo Poetry Amidst Climate Change
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Abstract
This article examines two Navajo Nation (Native American) female poets’ works in the context of environmental studies, ecopoetics and climate change. Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe remain critically neglected female poet laureates of the Navajo Nation for a variety of potential reasons mentioned herein. By considering ecopoetics and concerns with climate change from the early 1980s onwards, this article examines how Tohe and Tapahonso’s poetry from the same era reflects and engages with concurrent formal and environmental literary theories extending over thirty years. The bilingual and performative nature of the poetry is a formal testament to the difficult existence eked out by indigenous American dwellers of the Navajo Nation. Themes unveiled within poetry include social injustice, poverty, racism, extractivist enterprises on Navajo soil and environmental and spiritual pollution. Both poets, it is argued, deliberately situate their works in discourses of climate change, erosion, and environmental harm. How their poetry expands the field of ecopoetics and acts as an intervention against social and environmental injustices facing Navajo people is expounded.
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